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Hi.

You might remember the post where I told about my order from America. It contained two RC helicopters and the other one has been introduced here earlier. The BIG helicopter has not been tested until now. Now I’m ready to tell you about my experience on this Syma S033G RC helicopter.

I ran into some serious trouble from the very beginning but they are sorted now.

So the copter arrived home just great. Since it couldn’t fly here itself, a friendly courier brought it on my hands. All that has been covered on that Florida post, how I ordered, how it finally came to Finland and what did the package contain. Now we focus on this big Syma R/C helicopter.

Here it is in all it’s glory. The chassis is 25,5 inches long and the length between the tips of the main rotor is about 22 inches. So this is pretty serious size for a R/C helicopter and it’s not meant to be flown inside. Or let me just rephrase that. It’s not meant to be flown in an apartment or house. A some kind of a hall (football etc.) would do just fine and the flying conditions can be very good at such places.

The helicopter printed on the package was red but it was said in the store that the final product may be either red or yellow. I don’t really care about the color, it still looks good. This S033G looks pretty much like the smaller S107 so there is just the size difference like shown below.

The two main rotors take care of going up/down and turning left/right. The little rotor at the rear tries to take care of going back and forth. Tries, because it doesn’t do very well on that task. I’ll get back on that a bit later on this article.

The controller is quite big and very plastic like. The width is about 6 inches and height about 6.7 inches (antenna excluded). There seems to be awfully lot of switches on the controller but some of them turned out to be just fake ones. There is a power light in the middle and under it there is 3 fake switches. You can find the actual power switch under those. There is a throttle lever on the left side and the lever on the right side takes care of movement.

You can find three different functions on the bottom half of the controller:

Trim which can be used to make the copter stay in place if it tries to turn left or right by itself.

Two channel options if you’re flying with two of these at the same time.

The speed setting for the rear rotor. When the button is pushed down, the rotor should rotate faster and the helicopter should move forward faster.

This Syma S033G helicopter operates at 27 Mhz frequency.

So, now we get to the first problem which is charging up the battery. There are wires on the bottom of the helicopter. Black ones are meant to be connected together and the white on is for charging. This wire is hooked into the charger which works with the AC/DC adapter.

As I’ve told you, the helicopter was ordered from Amazon US and here’s what happened.

If you live in the United States, there’s nothing special here. The thing is, I don’t. I live in Europe and both the connectors and the voltage is different and there we get to the problem. You could always use some kind of an universal adapter to make the connectors fit in our sockets but it wouldn’t solve the problem with the voltage. The AC/DC adapter that was included, works only on 110 V (I know many adapters out there work with both 110 V and 230 V). If you go and put this in to our socket, you’ll be in real trouble.

So flying this helicopter did not work out because I had nothing to charge up the battery. Did I leave it there, of course not.

Syma is not an American company but Chinese (can anyone be surprised here). I found their own online store after a bit of searching and they had spare parts too. What do you know, they had an European AC/DC adapter for sale for 6.51€ with the shipping included from Hong Kong to Finland.

After about three weeks, the package arrived and I was finally able to charge up my helicopter. The white wire under the Syma S033G was connected to the charger and the charger to the adapter. Two lights were lit, the other one was red (power) and the other one was green (charging). After the green light was shut after about 2-3 hours, you were able to fly with it about 6-7 minutes. Not very long, aye.

Out we went and started testing.

The sun was shining and it was only -5 Celsius. Syma was able to show how it operates on winter conditions.

There is no point of talking about the flight. It’s better to show you first how it flew.

There it went and flew nicely up and down and was turning left and right. Going forward or backwards was lousy, no matter what the speed was on the rear rotor. The reason is the tiny rotor it has and there is much talk about the modifications you can do for the Syma S033G copter on the internet. One way is to glue the spare main rotors from a Syma S107G on top of the rear rotors on Syma S033G. I’m going to try this one as soon as I have the time and then I will tell you about the results afterwards. Out-of-the box this helicopter doesn’t fly properly and the enthusiasm you might have had earlier, dies quickly.